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Contributors - “Science, Numbers and Politics”

Axel Utz

Axel Utz is a comparative historian and linguist who received a doctoral degree from the Pennsylvania State University. He also studied at for Social Research in New York City (M.A. in ) and the Technical University of (Dipl.-Ing.). His research is in comparative colonialism with a focus on local responses from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Recently completed work includes 'Work, Morality, and Ideologies of Growth in O'odham Country, 1720-1760' and 'Mutual Obligations and Resource Use: River and Desert People in the Lower Colorado, 1680-1760.' His current research as an independent scholar is on South, East, and Central Africa from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. He also works as a computational linguist in the software industry.

Kaat Louckx

Kaat Louckx is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology and the Department of and Moral Sciences, Ghent University (Belgium). She has also worked as a visiting scholar at the Department of History at the (Finland). In 2016 – 2017, she will work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago. Her research interests include history of science, political sociology and social theory. She has completed a PhD dissertation on the politics of membership and belonging, and more particularly, on the étatisation of the corps social (Quetelet) through state-istics in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Her work appeared, amongst others, in the Journal of Belgian History (2012), The Sociological Review (2014) and Social Science History (2015).

Ida H. Stamhuis

I am educated as a mathematical statistician. My PhD (1989) was on the history of statistics in The Netherlands in the 19th C. I am an associate in History of Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. From 2009 to 2014 I was an honorary professor at . I am the editor of Centaurus and the head of the VU University-wide Stevin Centre for History of Science and . I am intrigued by the penetration of statistical and probabilistic thinking in the various sciences as well as in society and I was involved in the publication of several volumes on this topic. I studied the geneticists and Tine Tammes, who both attained innovative results through statistical and probabilistic thinking. I am working at a book on the phenomenon of the involvement of many women in the establishment of genetics between 1900 and 1940.

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Anat Leibler

I pursued my Ph.D. at the Sociology and Science Studies Program, UCSD. Currently I am completing a book which is a social history of official statistics and demographic practices in and Canada during the first half of the Twentieth Century, with a focus on their role in shaping the social and political order. I have published articles on the origins of the binary ethnic category, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, on the first Israeli census in 1948, on surveillance practices of population management, and on the interplay of science and politics in processes of the Israeli nation-state building. I am also working on the travel of knowledge - a study of early attempts to standardize statistical measurements at the beginning of the twentieth century, around the Dominions of the British Empire. Among the awards I received are two fellowships of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Lady Davis Post-Doctoral fellowship, and Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, both from the Hebrew University, as well as an Aresty Visiting Scholar for fall 2014, Rutgers University, NJ. I am teaching at the Science and Technology Studies, graduate program, Bar Ilan University.

Jean-Guy Prévost

Jean-Guy Prévost is a professor in the Department of political science at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Over the last 25 years, he has devoted his research activities to the social and political analysis of quantification, covering a continuum that goes from statistics as a discipline and the tools it has developed to the institutional settings in which these are mobilized for political- administrative purposes. He has published extensively, with Jean-Pierre Beaud, on the history, development and use of statistics in Canada, and, as a single author, on statistics as a discipline and a practice of the State in Liberal and Fascist Italy. Among his publications are: A Total Science. Statistics in Liberal and Fascist Italy (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), and Statistics, Public Debate and the State, 1800-1945: A Social, Political and Intellectual History of Numbers (Pickering & Chatto, London, 2012), co-authored with Jean-Pierre Beaud.

Julia Schubert

Julia Schubert is a Research Associate within the Research Group “Discovering, Exploring, and Addressing Grand Societal Challenges”. The group is funded by Stiftung Mercator and located at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft (FIW), . In this context and under the supervision of Professor Dr. Rudolf Stichweh, she is working on her dissertation project “Scientific Expertise in Politics. The Case of Climate Engineering in the U.S.”. Her main research interests are sociological theory, the Science and Technology Studies, and methods of quantitative and qualitative text analysis. Before joining the FIW in 2014, she obtained her B.A. in Social Sciences from the Philipps- (2010) and a M.A. in Sociology from the Ruprecht-Karls- University of (2014) with a thesis on the “Conditions and Prospects of Science-Based Political Decision-Making”. In between, she completed a traineeship at the Consulting Department of the German American Chamber of Commerce of the Midwest (GACCoM) in Chicago, Illinois (USA).

Wolfgang Drechsler

Wolfgang Drechsler is Professor and Chair of Governance at Tallinn University of Technology and Vice for International Relations of the of Social Sciences. He has a PhD from the University of Marburg, the from the University of , and an Honorary from Corvinus University Budapest. He has served as Advisor to the President of Estonia, as Secretary with the German Wissenschaftsrat during German Reunification 2

(where his areas included emerging ranking issues), and, as an APSA Congressional Fellow, as Senior Legislative Analyst in the United States Congress. Recent visiting professorships: Gadjah Mada, Zhejiang, Louvain-la-neuve (André Molitor Chair), and Malaya Universities; currently at the National Institute of Development Administration in Bangkok. Wolfgang’s main areas of interest are Non-Western, especially Confucian, Buddhist, and Islamic, Public Administration and Governance; Public Administration, Technology and Innovation; and Public Management Reform generally; as well as Political Philosophy and Economic Theory.

Radhika Gorur, Bryan Maddox, Estrid Sørensen

Radhika Gorur is a Senior Lecturer in the , Deakin University, Australia. She holds a PhD in Education (University of Melbourne), an MA in Curriculum and Teaching (Michigan State University), and a Graduate Diploma in Teaching, and has over 25 years of experience in teaching and leadership roles in schools in various parts of the world. She has also held research positions at Victoria University and at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include education policy, the sociology of numbers, evidence-based policy and Science and Technology Studies. She is a Director of the Laboratory of International Assessment Studies, which promotes collaboration between psychometricians, anthropologists, , assessment experts, policy makers, sociologists and education scholars interested in creating better approaches to international assessments, promoting better use of such instruments and critiquing international assessments more usefully. She has published several papers on numbers, standardisation, quantification and education policy.

Bryan Maddox is a senior lecturer in social anthropology and education at the University of East Anglia, UK. He completed his ESRC funded PhD at Kings College London supervised by Prof Brian Street. Since then he has conducted ethnographic research on literacy practices and assessment, publishing widely in the field of literacy studies. He has conducted ethnographic research in Slovenia, Mongolia, and Bangladesh. His current research focuses on the practices of globalizing educational assessments – primarily the OECD large-scale high profile assessments PIAAC – ‘The Study of Adult Skills’, and ‘PISA for Development’, with a particular interest in how tests travel and how they are received and re-contextualized in and across diverse cultural settings. He is comfortable working in an interdisciplinary fashion between anthropology and psychometrics. His recent research on OECD assessment in Slovenia has used video- ethnographic methods and theory from linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis to produce micro-ethnographic accounts of large-scale assessment practices, with a particular focus on ‘testing situations’. He is a director of the Laboratory of International Assessment Studies and the PI on an ESRC funded seminar series on the Politics, Practices and Potentials of International Educational Assessments. His recent publications include: Maddox, B., Zumbo, B.D., Tay-Lim, B. S-H., & Qu, D. (2015). ‘An Anthropologist among the Psychometricians: Assessment Events, Ethnography and DIF in the Mongolian Gobi’. International Journal of Testing. 14 (2)291-309. Maddox, B. (2015). ‘The Neglected Situation: Assessment Performance and Interaction in Context’. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice. Vol. 22 (4) 427-443; Maddox, B. (2015). ‘Inside the Assessment Machine: The Life and Times of a Item’. M. Hamilton, B. Maddox and C. Addey (Eds.). Literacy as Numbers. University Press, pp 129-146.

Estrid Sørensen is a Professor of Cultural Psychology and Anthropology of Knowledge at the Ruhr-University in Bochum, . Founded in Science and Technology Studies her research interests concern practices of producing and circulating knowledge within science (particularly psychology) and between science and other areas of society, educational practices and assessment, documentation practices, technology and materiality in practice, epistemic around computer games and comparative and ethnographic methods. She has published widely on these areas and is the author of the book Materiality of Learning (Cambridge, 2009), co-editor of an 3 introduction to Science and Technology Studies (2012) and co-editor of the special issues Childish Science (2012) and Materiality and Subjectivity (2012). She holds a PhD in psychology from the and has taught pedagogical psychology at Aarhus University, sociology at the Technical University in Berlin, European ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin and social science at the Ruhr-University in Bochum. In Bochum she is also a PI of the Mercator Research Group “Spaces of Anthropological Knowledge: Production and Transfer”. Since 2008 she has been a member and secretary of the Council of the European Association for the Studies of Science and Technology (EASST).

Amanda Machin, Alexander Ruser, Nico Stehr

Alexander Ruser is a postdoctoral researcher at the Karl Chair for Cultural Studies at . He holds a PhD in Sociology supervised by Jürgen Kohl at the Max-Weber- Institute of Sociology at . He is currently researching the impact of ‘expert knowledge’ in public deliberation and political decision-making in the current Euro-Crisis. He has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Global Policy, Current Sociology and Journal of Civil Society. Alexander is an active member of an international research network on social philosophy of science coordinated by the Russian of Science.

Amanda Machin is a post-doctoral researcher at Zeppelin University, Germany where she is researching the interrelationship of climate change, and citizenship. She has a PhD in political theory supervised by Chantal Mouffe at the University of Westminster, London, UK. She holds a Masters degree in International Relations and Contemporary Political Theory from Westminster, and a Bachelors degree in Philosophy from UCL, London, UK. In her work on citizenship, agonism, embodiment, knowledge and environmental politics she asserts that political disagreement does not preclude democratic interaction but constitutes it, and therefore she challenges the assumption and aim of consensus over environmental issues. Her books are Nations and Democracy: New Theoretical Perspectives (Routledge, 2015) and Negotiating Climate Change: Radical Democracy and the Illusion of Consensus (Zed Books, 2013). She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Environmental Politics and Democratic Theory.

Nico Stehr is Karl Mannheim Professor of Cultural Studies at the Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany. He is a fellow of the Royal Society (Canada) and a fellow of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. His research interests center on the transformation of modern societies into knowledge societies and developments associated with this transformation in different major social institutions of modern society (e.g. science, politics, governance, the economy, inequality and globalization); in addition, his research interests concern the societal consequences of climate change. He is one of the authors of the Hartwell Paper on climate policy. Among his recent book publications are: Experts: The Knowledge and Power of Expertise (with Reiner Grundmann, Routledge 2011) and The Power of Scientific Knowledge (with Reiner Grundmann, Cambridge University Press, 2012), Knowledge (with Marian Adolf; Routledge, 2014) and Information, Power and Democracy (Cambridge University Press).

Yuval Vurgan

Mr. Vurgan is a Senior Team Leader at the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) Research and Information Center. Before that he was the center's senior researcher in the Education, and Sports Committee of the Knesset. The key areas of responsibility of the team include: Education Policy, Science and Technology Policy and Culture Policy.During his career at the Knesset, he has written over a 100 reports and policy briefs within the Knesset Research and Information Center, and professionally approved several hundreds more – all appear in full-text on the official Knesset's 4 website (all but a few in Hebrew). He holds a Master's degree in Democracy Studies and a Teaching Diploma in Civics. Currently he is a preliminary Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Jörg J. Dötsch

Born in 1978, in the German Rhineland, I made my “” in 1997. As a passionate reader I decided to study History, and literature in Heidelberg. During my advanced study period I got increasingly interested in other disciplines such as system theory or philosophy of science. As graduate assistant I got involved in a complex interdisciplinary project of the “Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities”, which edited documents of Early Modern Natural Philosophy, and this inspired me strongly. In 2003, I passed my state exam in both majors with the highest of marks. Besides working as a lecturer from 2004 to 2006 I attained my Master’s Degree in International Economic Relations in Budapest. This confronted me with the possibilities and boundaries of quantitative analysis in social sciences, evolutionary and institutional economics. This was a challenge for a humanist, but at the same time the most decisive stage of my intellectual career. As one fallen in love with heterodox economics, after three years at a corporate job in the automotive industry, I wisely decided to go back to University. Between 2009 and 2012, I finished my PhD concerning the problem of fragility, while working as a Research Assistant at the Andrássy University Budapest. A research fellowship of the national excellence program allowed me to stay there; a true fluke, because interdisciplinary research is one of the core values of this institution. Since 2012, my research has focussed on problems of knowledge and complexity in economic systems and the role of education.

Anne Rohstock

Anne Rohstock is Akademische Rätin at the Institute of Education at the University of Tubingen. She holds a M.A. in Education Sciences from the LMU Munich and a PhD in History of the . Dr Rohstock held positions at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the University of Luxembourg. Dr Rohstock's work focuses on educational strategies of international organizations since the interwar period, the role of science and expert networks in education policy, and transnational learning processes, especially since WW II. Her approach is best described as an attempt to write a present- oriented transnational history of education. Dr Rohstock is currently preparing her second book, which explores the “scientization” of education in a cultural-historical perspective.

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